Thanks to YouTube and the algorithm, I’ve become obsessed with Appalachian folklore. I’ve trailed 14 states without ever having set foot in any of them.I’ve learned the rules of no reply. I’ve dug a little deeper and become familiar with brown mountain lights. I grew up with folktales around campfires while sparks passed between old hearts and new ears. I’ve been watched by eyes in the forest. Ghosts in war paint. But now I know not to wander through the woods between dusk and dawn. The land remembers. Collects impressions like portraits and I’ve left impressions of my own.
Donna Faulkner lives in an old cottage in Rangiora, New Zealand.Free spirited and unconventional, she came to the business of writing later in life. Her work has been published in The Bayou Review, 300 Days of Sun, Takahē: Hua/ Manu,Tarot Poetry NZ, Windward Review, Havik, New Myths, and others.
He’d been invisible, subhuman even. It’d boiled over last week on a rare day shift when Coleman had paged him. After five years at minimum wage as the night janitor, Donovan hoped against hope, promotion? Nope, a visitor had come to the most lucrative movie studio in the world with dogshit on his shoe and Donovan had been called to scrape it off the carpet – straight out of a Rolling Stones song, the command issued with zero eye contact.
But today, invisibility paid off. It’d been so damn easy. Three bungee cords and an old sheet was all it took, R2 secured in the bed of his beat-up truck. Donovan was sweating despite the chill of the February Los Angeles night blowing through the open windows. He shut the radio, he had no patience for today’s music, the 80s were proving to be as bad as the 70s. A Beatles song ran through his brain as thrummed his fingers on the steering wheel, his eyes darting from speedometer to rear-view mirror.
There were two problems. First, telling Carla. She’d probably yell and try to get him to bring it back. But maybe not. She’d cried when they’d sent Andrea to kindergarten in a Goodwill jumper, a faint stain on the front. The dinginess of their apartment, the nights of boxed mac and cheese. Him, a musician trapped as a custodian, her, a painter trapped as a waitress. They deserved this break.
Second, selling R2. It wouldn’t be like fencing stolen jewelry. But hell, this town was full of eccentric rich guys. He’d find someone. Eduardo worked on a landscape crew in the hills, told him stories over 50 cent Coronas about those people. He’d have to cut him in, but Eddy was good people, it’d be okay.
He drove down his alley past the garbage cans. Yeah, the unit past the garbage cans. He pulled into the tight parking spot and saw the light on in their tiny kitchen. Was Carla up? His watch read 2 am.
She nearly leapt into his arms. He breathed her warmth and took in the smell of her hair. Then pulled back, “Is everything okay? Andrea?”
Carla smiled, “She’s fine. Look.” She pulled something from the front pocket of her flannel shirt.
It was a check from a lawyer’s office, $1500, almost three months’ rent on this dump. He squinted at her. “It’s an advance. They want me to paint their whole office, mural style. It’s a thing now. They love my stuff.” Carla’s words came out staccato. “This girl at work knew someone who knew someone. Sorry I didn’t tell you, I never thought …” She fell into him, her tears wet on his neck. He remembered his secret. His eyes welled up. He shut them and held her tight.
“Donovan?”
He opened his eyes.
Police lights pulsed through their kitchen. In the corner, the strings of his steel guitar glistened red and blue on each rotation.
François Bereaud is a husband, dad, full time math professor, mentor in the San Diego Congolese refugee community, and mediocre hockey player. He is the author of San Diego Stories published by Cowboy Jamboree Press and the novel, A Question of Family published by Stanchion Press. He’s the fiction editor at The Twin Bill.
There’s no place for wildlife if animals like these roam the cities. The country is in on the precipice of it’s next riot and the dollar store is out of mouth wash. I used to think about places like Tunisia and Medellin when I thought this life was fair and these words would take me outside of ghettos and the last stop on the A train.
But those dreams leave your head first. There’s a quick first love and then the rest of your life. How much dollar pizza can one stomach take? Are these fair thoughts when you’re sitting in a theater the punks of Portsmouth managed to reclaim? I’m a lucky man. I wrote a book and then I got to see the country.
I brush my teeth on a deserted street and think about my father’s face when I told him I’d quit my union job and was driving 400 miles to read poems for six minutes in Ohio. The shopping cart bum passes in silence. His throat unslit, his eyes greyed by time. What’s the point of locking the car? There’s nothing of our lives anyone would want to steal.
The tears of an empire have dried up. We don’t cry. We’re not curious. Is there a girl in Tunisia who dreams of Los Angeles? American’s don’t even see America. But the sun still hangs over Portsmouth, the babies smile here like they do in every womb, and the single string of a violin sounds sad whether you’re on the rooftops or in the street, the last one to call a city home or the first one on the bus out
Scott Laudati runs Bone Machine with his dog in NYC. He is the author of Play The Devil and Bone Machine. Visit him anywhere @ScottLaudati. X: @ScottLaudat. Instagram: @ScottLaudati. Substack: @ScottLaudati.
The cold bitter air of winter pierces my skin as I walk through the shady woods towards the pasture behind my house. I rest my frozen aching feet as I sit alone on a tree that has collapsed from the weight of the ice and snow piled up on it. All of a sudden I lose focus of my mission to seek out the pasture and sit with the tree. I identify with its pain, with its absence of life, and of love. Just as it has collapsed in the bitter cold I myself have collapsed. However, my breaking apart is not physically debilitating.
Just as the tree once felt the nourishment of the sun, I once felt the same supplement from love. As the tree lies broken and torn from its devastating fall, I am a walking open wound. With the absence of the sun the tree has collected a detrimental “coldness”, I myself have grown cold and bitter from a similar absence.
Soon my fate will meet that of this lonesome tree. Soon my heart will accumulate the same detrimental coldness, and I too will break to pieces.
Laura Ashley
Sometimes life gets busy and you stop writing, but poetry.com has your back (and your poems from 2002).
The dream is yours. The weather is maybe summer. The gulmohar reddening in the Linking Road sidewalk. Or a winter the telephone lines mid-morning losing the weight of dew drops like purposelessness. I don’t remember anything but the dream belongs to you and I am walking by it. Everything seems like a scaffold of extra similes coming down after a poem has got written. But what about the songs I am hearing from end-to-end. The voice is yours and the words sit beside me like a ton of bricks from a bulldozer ran like cruelty. I upturn one and then another. What do I know about shattering but I suspect I am famous for them. The phonemes of my torn frock. The syllables of a river once I saw die. It wanted to leave behind something of it. If not bones then an unclear dash with a waiting. Until I asked to make choices I didn’t know I cannot have, everything of everything. This thought has come down to me here, time dropping down its anchors. Soon the medium that’s yours shall puncture a hole in me. Submerge a sapling and envelope it with layers of shadows after shadows. I feel a wet breath on my forehead. I know I am nearing your good chest. And then the world dialing numbers, dialed mine. A wrong number disembarks me at the winter station. I feel feverish. I feel unloved. I feel you far.
Purbasha Roy
She is a writer from Jharkhand, India. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Denver Quarterly Review, SAND, Iron Horse Literary Review, The Margins as of late. Attained 2nd Position in 8th Singapore Poetry Contest. Best of the Net Nominee.
it is dark but the branch slides down the window in such a creepy way i almost run from the room—and i know it is a tree
but it sends shivers with how meticulous it moves, its leaves licking the glass, and i imagine it being on a documentary about how it had broken into my house
and killed me, and it’s just smiling at the interviewer with no remorse, only saddened because it was cut down and apprehended.
john compton (b. 1987), author of 18 books/chapbooks, is a gay poet who lives in kentucky with his husband josh, alongside dogs, cats, & mice. his previous full length book is “my husband holds my hand because i may drift away & be lost forever in the vortex of a crowded store” published with Flowersong Press (dec 2024); his newest full length book is “house as a cemetery” published with Rebel Satori Press (mar 2026). you can find his books, some poems, and other things here: https://linktr.ee/poetjohncompton
On a turn to light; chaos within the glow. All clay-red and mullein-yellow, distorted color furnace flames, embering memory and coal ash dumped in an unsuspecting stream.
On a turn to the dark; lonesome snow packed tight. All ice-blue and envelope-white, breath low and vapored, grins full of crooked teeth. We have our blankets, heat, lights low and our babies in the other room.
On a turn to the living; damp grass, peppermint, ivy that none of us will reach. All grass-green and horse-brown. Speak with me as we walk, goats in the spent pasture. Bolted down bollards at the parking lot edge upright, near the sickly trees, painting dulled greens and yellows above the warnings in safety orange. I’d make a great wife you know, and I have time for more mistakes.
On a turn to the dead; instants stood still, suggestions there in the ditches full of trash, a dark dummied oasis. All concrete-gray and street-black, passing but thick like all our ghosts pressed together as one.
traceramsey.com IG trace.ramsey “Trace Ramsey is a recipient of the North Carolina Artist Fellowship in Prose. Trace lives in Durham, NC and co-parents two children.“
The old vampires put on long black dresses to conceal their thinness and arrange bright pink shawls over their shoulders (not red, red is too old-fashioned) and pretend they have invitations to the wedding.
No one challenges them. They move through the reception hall stealthily keeping to the walls picking up nearly empty glasses to hold as camouflage until they reach the gifts table
and sip cautiously from the jealousies and the hatreds, the sharp bit of them like ripe pineapple on the tongue, then, egging each other on, they taste the hopes, so frothy and intoxicating.
The one person who recognizes them from the old days says nothing, but lifts his own glass in silent salute, recalling a time when he envied them their certainties, recalling the tastes of his own blood on their lips.
Patricia Russo’s work has appeared in One Art, Zin Daily, Wild Greens, Vagabond City, Hex Literary, and Eulogy Press.
